A Bilateral Cooperative Strategy for Swarm Escort under the Attack of Aggressive Swarms

Abstract

With the development of swarm intelligence and low-cost unmanned systems, the offence and defense of a swarm have become essential issues in defense and security technologies. A swarm of drones can be used to attack some high-value units (HVUs), such as bases or fuel tanks. Moreover, some moving HVUs such as cargo ships are also greatly threatened when attacked by a swarm of unmanned surface vehicles. A promising approach to protect a HVU from the attack of an aggressive swarm is to use another low-cost swarm. However, escorting a HVU with a swarm is challenging since defenders must respond to attacks and carry out escorts in a noncentralized manner. It is difficult to balance the above tasks well using the unilateral escort strategy adopted by defenders in previous studies. Therefore, this paper proposes a bilateral cooperative strategy for the swarm escort problem under the attack of aggressive swarms. In this bilateral cooperative strategy, the HVU adaptively select different evasion strategies by inferring the threat level according to the spatial distributions of the defenders and attackers. Meanwhile, the defenders of the swarm take a noncentralized escort algorithm by moving around the HVU in a dual-layer formation. Within each layer, the defenders cluster into several uniformly distributed subswarms to counteract the attackers. Numerical simulations are conducted using different aggressive swarm models to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed bilateral cooperative strategy.